Sunday, December 7, 2008

NPR recently did a story on the research of Professor Nalini Nadkarni of The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Basically, using satellite data from NASA, Professor Nadkarni was able to calculate that in 2005, there were 400,246,300,201 (more or less) trees on our globe! (You can read about the technical details on the NPR website.)

So how many trees per person are there? Nadkarni looked up the world's human population as of Dec. 31 and found that on that day, we numbered 6,456,789,877 (again, very more or less). Punching the figures into her calculator, she figured that the world supports 61 trees per person.

I think this story and the details about how the NASA data was crunched would make a great exhibit. If someone provides the venue, I'd be happy to work on it with them!

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